The Last Lycan System

Chapter 6: The Burning Palace Dream

The dream started the same way every fire starts. Small. Easy to ignore. A single flame in the dark, flickering somewhere just out of reach.

Noah was standing in a hallway he didn't recognize, stone walls carved with symbols that meant nothing and everything at once, and the flame was creeping along the tapestries above him, slow enough to almost look gentle.

Then it wasn't small anymore.

The fire ran up the walls all at once, swallowing the symbols, swallowing the ceiling, licking across a long banquet table set with plates no one had touched. Somewhere behind him a woman was screaming his name … except it wasn't his name, not Noah, something else, something with more weight to it, a word that felt like it belonged in his mouth even though he'd never said it before.

*Kaelen.*

He turned to find her and the hallway kept stretching, longer with every step, the fire chasing him no matter which direction he ran. Her voice kept calling, closer and then farther, closer and then farther, like the hallway itself was playing a cruel game with both of them.

*Kaelen, run. Don't look back. Run…*

Noah woke up gasping, tangled in his sheets, heart slamming so hard he could feel it in his teeth. The room was dark, the window still black with night, and for a moment he wasn't entirely sure which world he was in.

"You okay?" Dax's voice came from the other bed, groggy. "You were making noise."

"Fine." Noah sat up, wiping sweat from his forehead with a shaking hand. "Bad dream."

"Another one?"

"Yeah."

Dax propped himself up on one elbow, squinting through the dark. "You've had, what, three this week? You should really tell someone."

"Tell them what? That I dream about fire?"

"I don't know. Sounds like more than just fire, the way you were talking in your sleep."

Noah's stomach dropped. "I was talking?"

"Mumbling, mostly. Couldn't make most of it out." Dax yawned, already sinking back into his pillow. "Said a name, I think. Didn't catch it."

"What did it sound like?"

"I don't know, man, I was half asleep. Something foreign-sounding. Two syllables, maybe three." Dax pulled his blanket back up. "You should ask Vess about it tomorrow. Recurring dreams sometimes mean something's off with shift stability, even for…"

He stopped himself before finishing the sentence, and Noah didn't make him finish it.

"I'll think about it," Noah said, which they both knew meant he wouldn't.

Noah didn't answer beyond that. He sat there in the dark long after Dax's breathing evened back out into sleep, replaying the dream in his head, chasing the sound of that name until it started to blur at the edges the way dreams always did once daylight got close enough to touch them.

*Kaelen.*

He'd never heard the name before in his life. He was almost certain of that. And yet some small, buried part of him had reached for it the second he woke, like catching the tail end of something that belonged to him and had been missing a long time.

He didn't fall back asleep. He lay there until the window went gray, then got up and got dressed before the wake-up bell even rang, needing to be moving, needing to not be alone with his own head for a while.

He made it through morning classes on autopilot, nodding when nodding seemed right, answering when called on with answers he barely remembered giving. In combat theory, the instructor asked him a direct question and he answered it a full ten seconds late, drawing a few stares and one comment he didn't bother responding to. By lunch, the dream had faded into something that felt almost embarrassing to still be thinking about … just a dream, he told himself, the kind everyone had sometimes, nothing that deserved this much space in his head.

Then he sat down at the library table to study, and the woman's voice came back so suddenly it was like she'd never stopped.

*Run. Don't look back.*

He put his pen down and stared at the wall until the feeling passed, and when it finally did, he found he couldn't sit still anymore. He packed his bag and left before he'd finished a single page.

He didn't decide to go to the courtyard. His feet just took him there, the way they sometimes did lately, past the fountain, past the old dormitory wing, until he was standing in front of the six weathered wolf statues again, staring at the third one like it might have an answer he hadn't thought to ask for.

The courtyard was empty this time of day, everyone still at lunch or holed up studying, and something about the silence made the statue feel bigger than it had before, older, like it had been waiting specifically for a moment when no one else was around.

*Kaelen,* he thought, feeling foolish even as he did it. *Is that supposed to mean something to you?*

Nothing happened. Of course nothing happened. It was carved stone, worn smooth by two hundred years of weather, and he was standing in the middle of a courtyard talking to it like it could hear him.

He almost laughed at himself. Almost turned around and walked away.

Then, quietly, so quietly he might have imagined it if his whole body hadn't gone rigid at the same moment, he said the name out loud instead of just thinking it.

"Kaelen."

The stone wolf's eyes caught the light.

Not the way they had before … not a flicker, not a trick of the sun. This time the light held, steady and unnatural, deepening from gray to something closer to silver, and the low hum Noah had felt once before in his chest surged so suddenly and so hard that his knees buckled and he had to catch himself against the statue's base.

The ground beneath his palm felt warm. Not stone-in-the-sun warm. Warm like something underneath it was breathing, slow and patient, waiting for exactly this.

Somewhere behind him, a voice he didn't recognize spoke his name … his real name, the one on his academy file, not the one from the dream.

"Noah Gray."

He spun around so fast he nearly lost his footing entirely, heart slamming against his ribs, and found himself face to face with a groundskeeper he'd never seen before in his life, standing far closer than anyone should have been able to get without him noticing.

The man wasn't looking at Noah's face. He was staring at the statue's glowing eyes, and at the ground beneath Noah's hand, with an expression that had nothing to do with curiosity and everything to do with fear.

"Who are you?" Noah asked, still trying to catch his breath.

"Someone who's been waiting a long time for you to say that name out loud." The man's eyes flicked toward the dormitory windows overlooking the courtyard, checking for watchers. "You need to come with me. Right now. Before anyone else sees this."

"I don't even know you."

"No," the man agreed. "But I knew your mother."